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AP sues State Department, seeking access to Clinton records

By STEVE PEOPLESWASHINGTON (AP) — The Associated Press filed a lawsuit Wednesday against
the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and
government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as secretary
of state.

The legal action comes after repeated requests filed under the U.S.
Freedom of Information Act have gone unfulfilled. They include one
request AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of
2013.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of
Columbia, comes a day after Clinton broke her silence about her use of a
private email account while secretary of state.

The FOIA requests and
lawsuit seek materials related to her public and private calendars,
correspondence involving longtime aides likely to play key roles in her
expected campaign for president, and Clinton-related emails about the
Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance
practices.

"After careful deliberation and exhausting our other options, The
Associated Press is taking the necessary legal steps to gain access to
these important documents, which will shed light on actions by the State
Department and former Secretary Clinton, a presumptive 2016
presidential candidate, during some of the most significant issues of
our time," said Karen Kaiser, AP's general counsel.

Said AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, "The Freedom of Information
Act exists to give citizens a clear view of what government officials
are doing on their behalf. When that view is denied, the next resort is
the courts."

State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach declined to comment. He had
previously cited the department's heavy annual load of FOIA requests —
19,000 last year — in saying that the department "does its best to meet
its FOIA responsibilities." He said the department takes requests "first
in, first out," but noted that timing depends on "the complexity of the
request."

Carroll said the AP was filing additional requests Wednesday using FOIA
and other tools following the disclosure last week that Clinton had used
a private email account run on a server on her property outside New
York while working at the State Department.

Clinton on Tuesday said she sent and received about 60,000 emails from
her personal email address in her four years as President Barack Obama's
secretary of state. She said roughly half were work-related, which she
turned over to the State Department, while deleting tens of thousands
more that were personal in nature.

The department says it will take several months to review the material
Clinton turned over last year. Once the review is complete, the
department said, the emails will be posted online.

The AP had sought Clinton-related correspondence before her use of a
personal email account was publicly known, although Wednesday's court
filing alleges that the State Department is responsible for including
emails from that account in any public records request.

"State's failure to ensure that Secretary Clinton's governmental emails
were retained and preserved by the agency, and its failure timely to
seek out and search those emails in response to AP's requests, indicate
at the very least that State has not engaged in the diligent, good-faith
search that FOIA requires," says AP's legal filing.

Specifically, AP is seeking copies of Clinton's full schedules and
calendars from her four years as secretary of state; documents related
to her department's decision to grant a special position to longtime
aide Huma Abedin; related correspondence from longtime advisers Philippe
Reines and Cheryl Mills, who, like Abedin, are likely to play central
roles in a Clinton presidential campaign; documents related to Clinton's
and the agency's roles in the Osama bin Laden raid and National
Security Agency surveillance practices; and documents related to her
role overseeing a major Defense Department contractor.

The AP made most of its requests in the summer of 2013, although one was
filed in March 2010. AP is also seeking attorney's fees related to the
lawsuit.

Other organizations have also sued the State Department recently after lengthy delays responding to public record requests.

In December, the conservative political advocacy group Citizens United
sued the State Department for failing to disclose flight records showing
who accompanied Clinton on overseas trips. Last week, the National
Security Archive, an organization that gathers declassified government
records, filed a lawsuit after waiting more than seven years for the
State Department to release of details of former secretary of state
Henry Kissinger's telephone conversations.

Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, predicted the
State Department would speed up its review facing legal action,
particularly given that Clinton has said that her email correspondence
doesn't include classified material.

"When the government is under a court deadline, or really wants to
review, they can whip through thousands of pages in a matter of weeks,
which they should do here," Blanton said.

The State Department generally takes about 450 days to turn over records
it considers to be part of complex requests under the Freedom of
Information Act. That is seven times longer than the Justice Department
and CIA, and 30 times longer than the Treasury Department.

An inspector general's report in 2012 criticized the State Department's
practices as "inefficient and ineffective," citing a heavy workload,
small staff and interagency problems.
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